Toward Ruin or Recovery?

I. The Tormented

Thirty-one years ago, I was raped while I was living in Italy. I was 23 years old. I have never written about this experience publicly before, but I decided to do so after I read a long essay in the politics and culture journal Liberties titled, “After a Rape: A Guide for the Tormented.” That essay is written by the journal’s managing editor Celeste Marcus, and it details her recovery process following an alleged sexual assault two and a half years ago. She expresses her hope that others might learn from her story and draw some meager comfort from the advice she has to offer:

What follows is a guide for the tormented. Its objective is to offer a taxonomy of rape’s afterlife, so that you, the victim, can make sense of your own grief. The grief will initially strike you as overwhelming, as all you will ever know. It will feel unbearable and sometimes it will be unbearable. In the early days you will worry that the grief will never end, that the inside of your mind will always be a hostile place, and that from now on you will conceive of yourself primarily as a rape victim and a rape survivor. It will take a long time until that is no longer the most salient thing about you. That crushing identity will slowly lighten and lift. Healing will take a long time, but it can be managed responsibly by anticipating the dangers and preparing for them. It cannot be sped up, though it can be slowed down.

If the last two or three lines of that passage sound tentatively hopeful, the essay itself is not. It is a torturous account of a victim trapped in the netherworld of unresolved rape trauma, written in the language of 1990s anti-rape activism recently accelerated by the #MeToo movement: “You have heard that one in four women will be victims of rape by the time they reach their mid-twenties,” Marcus tells us, “but now the implications of ‘one in four’ will grab you by the throat. When you walk down the street you will start counting—the women, of course, but also the men. The inverse of that statistic will dawn on you: if one in four women are victims, how many of the men you walk past are perpetrators?”

Marcus did not name her alleged attacker in her Liberties essay, but she revealed his identity on social media a month later. On February 4, she posted a screenshot on Twitter of an email she had sent to the Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance shortly after her essay appeared, in which she wrote: “It has been two and a half years since the rape, and I believe it is past time for you to know that the rapist was Yascha Mounk. You have a rapist on the staff of your illustrious publication.” In the accompanying tweet, she declared: “I will not be raped with impunity.”

Is her accusation plausible? It is impossible to tell. Marcus provides us with nowhere near enough information to render an informed judgment, divulging no context and almost no detail about the alleged assault itself—we learn only that she awoke as it was happening. “I was in and out of sleep when he penetrated me and was jolted wide awake when he started moving fast inside me” she writes. Further down, she adds: “I woke up when he started moving quickly as if about to climax, and that was when I said ‘no, no, no’ for the final time.” We do not learn how she and this man ended up in the same bed, how or when her clothing was removed, or what words were exchanged before or after the rape. “I had said no to him so many times before,” she writes, but we do not know when she said this or under what circumstances.

Mounk has yet to publish his own version of events, and perhaps he never will. Approached for comment by the Washington Post, he said only, “I am aware of the horrendous allegation against me. It is categorically untrue.” Despite this vehement denial and the absence of a police report or any other evidence, the Atlantic cut its ties with Mounk the day his name was made public. In the era of #MeToo and social media, due process has been shunted aside in favor of crowdsourced adjudication and retribution. Like so many before him, Mounk has been publicly shamed and sanctioned, even though the grave allegation against him remains unsupported and untested in a court of law.

There can be no doubt about the depth of Marcus’s bitterness, her near-mythic rage, or her thirst for vengeance. She imagines visiting crippling emotional sanctions on her accused: “I wished I believed in hell so that I could believe he would burn forever” and “I wanted the word [rapist] to rise like bile in his throat every time he read his own byline. His condign punishment would have been the burning tang of his own evil present as a taste on his tongue.” But the essay’s ferocity swallows up any clarity of analysis. Her guide is both a cri de coeur and the culmination of half-a-century of ever-worsening advice about rape. 

Feminists once called for street lights on dark sidewalks, pepper spray on key chains and rape kits in hospitals, self-defense classes, better laws, fairer trials, and buddy systems for getting home safely from frat parties. But the prevailing discourse now sweeps that agenda aside in favor of a counsel of despair exemplified by Marcus’s memoir: rapists are everywhere, medical examinations are pointless, and there is no help to be found from either the police or the courts. In the aftermath of a rape, all that remains are an endless journey of self-care and the vengeful wrath of the ruined woman.

We have been here before. I read Marcus’s essay wearily, because I believe that she is a victim of the same bad dogma she now encourages others to embrace. The modern feminist response to rape is failing women, and it is failing the victims of rape most of all.